Even when you get your hostages back, there can be serious reprecussions–as President Barack Obama is fast learning.

Several Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate believe that Obama broke the law by exchanging five Taliban leaders for captured U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

And they are urging Congress to investigate whether this is grounds for impeachment.

A Federal law requires the Secretary of Defense to notify Congress 30 days before releasing any detainees from prison. He must also explain why they are not expected to again pose a threat to the United States.

“I think in the eyes of many, he broke the law by not informing Congress 30 days before that,” California Rep. Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on MSNBC Monday.

“[National Security Advisor Susan] Rice said Congress has been informed of this along the way. I don’t know who they were talking to. I have not been a part of this, and I’m the chairman of the committee.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is highly concerned that the five released Taliban prisoners could will return to wage war against Americans.

Senator Lindsey Graham

In a letter he recently sent to Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ranking Member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Graham stated:

“The five terrorists released were the hardest of the hard-core. They have American blood on their hands and surely as night follows day they will return to the fight.

“In effect, we released the ‘Taliban Dream Team.’ The United States is less safe because of these actions.”

Graham predicted that the release will “inevitably lead to more Americans being kidnapped and held hostage throughout the world.”

Meanwhile, in Israel, tensions are high over the kidnapping, on June 12, of three teenagers in the West Bank. They were hitchhiking home near the Palestinian city of Hebron. Two of the teens are Israelis; the third is an American.

Their kidnappers are presumed to be Palestinian militants.

Israeli soldiers scoured the West Bank but, so far, no signs of the missing teens have turned up. And, so far, no one has claimed responsibility for the kidnappings.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, warned his countrymen in a televised statement: “We are in the midst of a complex operation. We need to be prepared for the possibility that it will take time.”

Usually, political kidnappings trigger ransom demands and agonizing decisions by high-ranking government officials as to whether they should be met.

But there is another way governments can respond to such terroristic blackmail. It might be called, “The KGB Method.”

On September 30 1985, four attaches from the Soviet Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, were kidnapped by men linked to Hizbollah (“Party of God”), the Iranian-supported terrorist group.

The kidnappers sent photos of the four men to Western news agencies. Each captive was shown with an automatic pistol pressed to his head.

The militants demanded that Moscow pressure pro-Syrian militiamen to stop shelling the pro-Iranian militia in Lebanon’s northern port city of Tripoli.

And they threatened to execute the four Soviet captives, one by one, unless this demand was met.

The Soviet Union began negotiations with the kidnappers, but could not secure a halt to the shelling of Tripoli.

Only two days after the kidnappings, the body of Arkady Katov, a 30-year-old consular secretary, was found in a Beirut trash dump. He had been shot through the head.

That was when the KGB took over negotiations.

Insignia of the KGB

They kidnapped a man known to be a close relative of a prominent Hizbollah leader. Then they castrated him, stuffed his testicles in his mouth, shot him in the head, and sent the body back to Hizbollah.

The KGB then informed the Hizbollah leader: We know the names of other close relatives of yours, and the same will happen to them if our diplomats are not released immediately.

Soon afterward, the remaining three Soviet attaches were released only 150 yards from the Soviet Embassy.

Hizbollah telephoned a statement to news agencies claiming that the release was a gesture of “goodwill.”

In Washington, D.C., then-CIA Director William Casey decided that the Soviets knew the language of Hizbollah.

The United States has fallen prey to Political Correctness, and thus refuses to acknowledge a connection between Islamic terrorism and the Islamic religion.

Even worse, those who dare produce evidence of such a link–often in the words of the terrorists themselves–are marked for attacks on their integrity.

So wrote Steven Emerson, founder and executive editor of The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), in an ad/editorial published in The New York Times in late May.

From that ad:

“Our nation’s security and its cherished value of free speech has been endangered by the bullying campaigns of radical Islamic groups, masquerading as ‘civil rights’ organizations, to remove any reference to the Islamist motivation behind Islamic terrorist attacks.

“These groups have pressured or otherwise colluded with Hollywood, the news media, museums, book publishers, law enforcement and the Obama Administration in censoring the words ‘Islamist’, ‘Islamic terrorism’, ‘radical Islam’ and ‘jihad’ in discussing or referencing the threat and danger of Islamic terrorism.”

Among the examples Emerson sited of the corrosive effects of Political Correctness on America’s anti-terrorist policy:

Federal prosecutors are prohibited from investigating the religious justifications for terrorist attacks.

The FBI has succumbed to pressure from these Islamist groups by purging and destroying thousands of books, pamphlets, papers and PowerPoint presentations that were deemed to be “offensive to Islam.”

Brandeis University capitulated to an organized campaign to rescind plans to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali–a tireless campaigner against abuses of women in Muslim cultures–an honorary degree.

ABC Family Channel killed a pilot TV series, called “Alice in Arabia,” about an American teenage girl forced to live against her will in Saudi Arabia.

And he posed the disturbing question: “How can we win the war against radical Islam if we can’t even name the enemy?”

Yet many on the Left believe this is a question that should not even be asked.

One of those is Raya Jalabi, a copy editor for the liberal British newspaper, The Guardian.

Raya Jalabi

Jalabi was enraged by the IPT’s ad/editorial.

Jalabi wrote: “Why would the New York Times stoop to running an Islamophobe’s ad?” She went on to describe the ad as “gratuitously offensive on racial, religious or ethnic grounds.”

She then took issue with the IPT’s “plea for readers to ‘learn more’ about the unnamed terror groups wreaking havoc on these United States.” As if education is, in itself, something to avoid.

Jalabi then railed against “an ‘education’ pamphlet that urges citizens to fight back against the ‘campaign of censorship’ that the supposedly ‘main radical Islamic groups’ have been waging against the most sacred freedom: free speech.’

“Never mind,” she asserted, “that the groups whom the IPT calls ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ are actually mainstream Muslim-American groups–like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Students Association [MSA].””

Sixty years ago, on March 9, 1954, at the height of the Joseph McCarthy “Red Scare,” Edward R. Murrow, the most respected broadcast journalist in America, offered an eloquent argument against censorship:

Edward R. Murrow

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular….”

That argument–like the First Amendment–still stands, and both are worth remembering.

“Speeches at publishers-and-editors meetings are usually by definition reasonably self-indulgent, a lot of talk about the greatness of the press and the freedom therof.”

So wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be, his monumental 1979 book on the American news media: CBS, Time, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

It’s highly unusual for a major newspaper to attack another publication, unless there is overwhelming evidence of libel and/or recklessness.

So it must have come as a shock to the researchers and writers of The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), to find their online newsletter attacked by–of all people–a copy editor for The Guardian.

A British newspaper, The Guardian bills itself as “the world’s leading liberal voice.”

And since freedom of speech is a major issue for those who call themselves liberals, it’s strange to see someone from a liberal publication calling for censorship.

Yet that is exactly what happened in late May.

To begin at the beginning:

According to its website, the IPT “is recognized as the world’s most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups.

“For more than a decade, the IPT has investigated the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic terrorist and extremist groups in the United States and around the world.

“It has become a principal source of critical evidence to a wide variety of government offices and law enforcement agencies, as well as the U.S. Congress and numerous public policy forums.”

The site further states that Steve Emerson, its founder and executive director, “is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and national security and author.

Oliver “Buck” Revell, former head of FBI Investigations and Counter-Terrorism; and

Bob Blitzer, former counterterrorism chief at the FBI.

A major theme of Emerson’s publication is that much of the political leadership the United States has fallen prey to Political Correctness. As a result, they refuse to acknowledge a connection between Islamic terrorism and the Islamic religion.

In late May, the IPT posted an ad in The New York Times, warning about the consequences of such a policy.

Entitled, “Fighting Back Against the Assault on Free Speech by Radical Islamic Groups,” the ad opened thusly:

“Our nation’s security and its cherished value of free speech has been endangered by the bullying campaigns of radical Islamic groups, masquerading as ‘civil rights’ organizations, to remove any reference to the Islamist motivation behind Islamic terrorist attacks.

“These groups have pressured or otherwise colluded with Hollywood, the news media, museums, book publishers, law enforcement and the Obama Administration in censoring the words ‘Islamist’, ‘Islamic terrorism’, ‘radical Islam’ and ‘jihad’ in discussing or referencing the threat and danger of Islamic terrorism.”

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